Why Google will stop reading your emails to address advertising

Google will stop tracking the content of the emails of Gmail users, a controversial practice that has allowed them to show targeted advertising within the application since the premiere of the service in 2004.

The surprising movement, in keeping with the cape and sword defense that the company has carried out during all these years, despite the critics and the vigilance of the regulators, is aimed at encouraging sales of its services in the corporate environment.

The tracking was only done in the free version of Gmail, not for companies that paid for the service in exchange for extra administration functions. However, confusion about this activity made it difficult to attract new corporations to service, Diane Greene, head of Google’s cloud business, said in a statement Friday.

“Customers of our suite and users who use Gmail for free can continue to trust that Google will maintain the privacy and security landscape as we continue to innovate,” the board said.

Google says it plans to make the change ” this year .” Continue reading emails to detect potential cyber attacks as files with “malware” code or attempts to steal credentials through “phishing” attacks.

Advertising will not disappear . It is what makes it possible for its more than 1,200 million users to use the service for free. But now, it will show targeted advertising through the data it collects from its users through its search service or YouTube.

Gmail soon became a very popular tool thanks to its large storage capacity and powerful search engine. But it has always been controversial because of the transparent tracking of the emails of its users.

Google has 3 million companies paying for its suite of applications in the cloud, which includes tools such as Gmail or Google Docs, and its use has doubled in the last year among the largest customers, says Greene. But its main business has always been focused on the end user while that piece of cake has been controlled by Microsoft, which is getting more and more companies to hire their Office 365 service. Make it clear that the privacy of data as sensitive as emails is respected. They exchange in a large corporation is one of the first steps.

The maneuver is not simple altruism, and aims to promote a business so far secondary to Google. It is also a key measure for 2018, when the new European Data Protection Regulation, better known as GDPR for its acronym in English, will enter into force, which will force all companies to collect or process data of European citizens regardless of where operate to have privacy as a principle of service design and to require the explicit consent of the user to process their data. If a company with operations in Europe wants to comply with the GDPR, the services in the cloud that it contracts must also be aligned with this regulation.